ECLECTICA CONTEMPORARY
With an increasing focus on African Art around the world, Eclectica Contemporary aims to present a carefully selected and focused collection of art from the continent that interrogates issues facing us in a globalized world. The art at Eclectica Contemporary often showcases practices and materials from art history but which push these boundaries and explore uncharted territories of representation, technique and theory.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Eclectica Contemporary sees itself as an African gallery with an international vision. We celebrate the diversity and depth of art making on our continent while aiming to contextualize it for a growing global market.
Our program of exhibitions shows a mix of solo shows by gallery artists alongside curated group shows. In addition, the Eclectica Contemporary exhibition space has facilities for experimental, new media and project-based works.
EXHIBITIONS
After The First Look
After the First Look revisits a selection of portraits beyond their first encounter, asking how perception shifts over time. Removed from the contexts that first shaped their reception, these works invite a slower, more critical form of looking, one that unsettles assumptions around identity, value, and visibility. Moving between presence and surface, recognition and doubt, the exhibition reflects on how meaning is never fixed, and how what we see changes as we do.
Procession as Myth: The Sacred Cinematic Worlds of Ebenezer Samuel Akinola
In the paintings of Ebenezer Samuel Akinola, movement becomes ritual. His figures traverse imagined ceremonial spaces with the solemnity of a procession, suspended between the contemporary and the ancestral, the intimate and the mythic. Constructed through carefully staged performances and translated into paint with remarkable technical precision, Akinola’s works combine cinematic storytelling, spiritual symbolism, and collective presence. Through flowing drapery, ambiguous narratives, and contemporary mythologies, the artist transforms the modern body into a vessel of memory, ritual, and passage.
Reframing Visibility | An All-Women Group Show
Reframing Visibility brings together women artists whose practices explore presence, perception, and the conditions through which women are seen and interpreted. Across painting, sculpture, and experimental forms, the exhibition considers visibility not as a fixed state, but as a complex and contested field shaped by social expectation, resistance, and self-definition.
The planet is screaming, listen to mother Earth
A solo show by South African and Spanish artist Pierre Louis Geldenhuys, reflecting on the natural environment using innovative and intuitive techniques that unravel humanity's relationship to mother nature. He was featured at The 2026 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
INSIGHTS
Not All Lives Are Legible | A Look Back in 2026 | Notes from the Director
Not All Lives Are Legible looks back on three exhibitions, Lost Souls, The Repenters, and Darkness Rising, reflecting on how each engaged with the construction of the “other” within political and cultural systems. Moving from absence to misinterpretation to self-definition, Director Shamiela Tyer revisits questions of visibility, representation, and narrative control that remain deeply relevant today.
Loyiso Mkize | A Nation Still Reckoning with Winnie | Notes from the Director
Notes on the creation of an artwork that would find it's way into becoming the cover image of the Netflix documentary "The Trials of Winnie Mandela" - Shamiela Tyer reflects on Loyiso Mkize's artistic process of capturing Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's essence, in relation to the complexities of her life in the public eye as a prolific political figure.
Johannes Phokela | Exploring Virtue, Contradiction and Power at the 2026 Venice Biennale | Notes from the Director
An atmosphere of virtue, thick with contradiction. Director and curator of Eclectica Contemporary, Shamiela Tyer, revisits Johannes Phokela's inclusion in the 2026 Venice Biennale.